Whether you are in a startup, or an innovator within an existing company, you face a big challenge. How do you know your product will succeed, when 9 out of 10 products fail? The bad news is: you don’t. Not even if you’ve talked with potential customers about your new product. Many of us who have been there (including myself) know that what these potential customers SAY in these interviews is often different from what they will DO.

The good news is: there is a way to find out with a high degree of certainty. And it doesn’t mean investing in product development and taking a jump in the dark (and risk losing a lot of your time and money to find out whether people are willing to pay for it or not).

What if I told you that you don’t have to build a product to start selling it. I have applied it successfully myself several times in different markets. The framework is called The Mafia Offer and if done correctly it can convert at a whopping 80%… It’s an offer you simply cannot refuse :-). [Read more…]

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Often, because they do things differently than most of their competitors.

If all you do to get new customers is what everyone else is doing, your growth will likely be painstakingly slow.

Today I want you to get creative. You can leverage what you have and what you are naturally good at to create new streams of business for your company, or boost the existing ones.

A first thing to realize is how small improvements in your growth engine can have a big impact on your bottom line. Remember the example of the growth engine from Day 4? Imagine we make small improvements in 4 conversion rates: increase activation from 20 to 22%, nurturing from 60 to 63%, and the two activation steps from 15 to 17 and 80 to 85% respectively.

Here comes the cool part. The compounded effect of these changes will be a total of almost 40% improvement in bottom line sales!

Making such small improvements over time should certainly be possible, right?

Here is how successful companies do that.

A first step is to look at the metrics of your growth engine and decide where to focus on. For example, we built a growth engine for real estate agents in Belgium. After the leads started flowing in, we saw two possibilities for improvement:

Improve the conversion rate of capture (our landing page). This would have a direct impact on getting more out of what we spend on Google AdWords

Improve Google rating of our blog. After some analysis we established that our blog – although SEO optimized – has a very few links and it therefore scores bad in Google

Second, you need to look at your own strengths – and think creatively about how to leverage what you have. Continuing our real estate example, we realized that we can easily get relevant geographic data about Belgian municipalities from Wikipedia, and free government stats on real estate.

Here is what we did:

We have written a simple script that generates super-targeted Google AdWords. If anyone looks for a real estate agent in any Belgian village or town, we serve them a very targeted ad. For example, “47 real estate agents found in and around your town, compare them now”. We have then generated a series of more than 500 targeted landing pages, If the prospect clicks on a the Google AdWord, they end up on the right page with specific information for their municipality. This almost doubled our conversion rate!

To solve the problem of links, we started from the government data published as a large Excel file. We wrote a web application that generates more than 500 beautiful price guide infographics for each Belgian municipality. Next, we have reached out to website administrators of individual municipalities and asked them to link to these infographics.

Even if you don’t have technical knowledge to do this, with some creativity and strategic thinking, you can leverage what you have. Another example is a growth engine we built in the innovation sector:

There, we have written and published an article. At first, the article was doing okay, but not great.

Then, we spent an hour on keyword research and reworking the headline to include popular search terms, and to make it more “sharable” on social networks. As a result, the article started bringing more than 3000 visits via Google per month, and more than 800 people have recommended it to their friends and colleagues on social networks.

Next, we turned the article into a SlideShare slide deck, using a free beautiful template. This brought in another 4000+ views.

In the presentation itself, we have also embedded a call to signup to our “free bribe”, a 10-step email course for business development. A similar call is embedded next to the article.

This brings in a steady stream of leads, without us having to do any work.

Then, we purchased the SlideShare Pro version, which allowed us to create a lead generation form – calling anyone viewing the slides to sign up for a free bribe. The result: 30 leads in 2 days (30 is actually a maximum provided in the pricing plan we chose).

Finally, the same article is used as one of the steps in the nurturing process, which drives engagement and new visits and shares.

The lesson here? We could have just published the article and forgotten about it. But instead, we have taken a couple of extra steps, leveraged what we have, and got so much more out of that one single article.

Other lessons from today

Use your metrics as a management tool to decide where to focus. Remember: small changes can have big impact

Leverage your strengths and brainstorm ideas to improve your growth engine, based on what you have or can easily get

Adopt the mindset of experimentation. You are not your customer, and you simply cannot know upfront which of the improvements will work. Instead, try to carry out as many rapid experiments as you can until you find one that works

Once you find one that works, stay with it, and milk it for all it’s worth!

In fact, you can start planning your ongoing activities as a series of growth experiments. We organize a planning meeting every other week, with the following agenda:

Look at the results of previous weeks’ experiments and the latest metrics

Decide which experiments to continue, and which to drop

Brainstorm ideas for new experiments to run to further improve the figures

Prioritize and plan the experiments for next week

One last word of warning: do not underestimate the time it takes to set up an experiment. You cannot call one experiment a failure just because you didn’t do it right. How many times have I seen a failed blogging attempt or money thrown at an unoptimized Google AdWord campaign.

To be truly successful, you will need to build or acquire a number of skills, like copywriting, web design, and basically any technical capability to do whatever it takes to grow your business. If you don’t have the affinity or time to build these skills, you should consider hiring people who do.

***

This concludes our short course on a smart ways to grow your small business. If you have any questions, or you want to know more, don’t hesitate to reach out. Just shoot us an email to [email protected] or [email protected] or give me a call at +32 471 40 15 35.

And yeah, watch out for a bonus video we’ll be sending.

Be well. Bye.

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“After closely watching several hundred companies that have failed, I observed that a very large number of these had solved the product/market fit problem, but still failed because they had not found a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost…”

David Skok, five times serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist.

A growth engine is a beautiful thing. But as any other engine, it needs fuel to run. Every step has a cost. And with every step, you lose some prospects.

Let’s look at an example. Warning: if you don’t particularly like numbers, I still urge you to keep watching. You simply cannot build a viable growth engine without this basic understanding.

Imagine that your growth engine looks like this.

Visitors come to your landing page via articles on your blog, presentations on SlideShare and through Google AdWords. Each of these sources has a cost. Google AdWords is easy: the cost can be seen in your AdWords account. But a seemingly free sources have a cost too. They cost you your time or freelancer fees.

For the sake of this example, let’s say that on average, a visitor to your landing page costs $1.

In the next step, a percent of visitors sign up. Let’s say you have a conversion rate of 20% – in other words, out of 5 visitors, 1 signs up. You paid $5 for those 5 visitors (remember: a dollar per visitor). A cost of 1 signup is therefore $5.

In the next step, over a period of time, you send your subscribers several e-mails with nurturing content (day 3). However, not everyone is actively reading. Assume only half of signed up prospects are active. With a signup cost of 5, an active prospect then costs 10 dollars.

Remember the idea of day 3 – we are building relationship with these prospects, and our active prospects are responding. The system is working.

The active prospects are ready for your offer.

Say your offer is a free demo of your product. You create a dedicated landing page describing your product’s benefits, and write a compelling email to your active prospects. If you do this right, some prospects will respond and request the demo. After sending reminders to those who did not respond, you may also give them a call.

Imagine that 15% of active prospects agree to a meeting. In other words, you have to call 20 to get 3 appointments.

Let’s see how much those 3 appointments cost. At 10 bucks per active prospect, you have paid 200 to activate 20 prospects. But it also costs money to make phone calls. With 15 minutes per call, it takes 5 hours to call 20 prospects, or $250 (at 50 an hour). Therefore, 3 appointments cost 200 in acquisition, and 250 in calling, a total of 450. Or $150 per appointment.

Unfortunately, not everyone shows up to a meeting. Assume 80% eventually do. In other words, you need 5 appointments to get 4 meetings. 5 appointments costed $750 (150 each). Doing a meeting costs an additional 200 (assuming 4h to prepare, commute, attend and follow up). So those 4 meetings cost you 750 in scheduling plus 800 in effort. Or 387 dollars and 50 cents for a single meeting!

Assuming half of meetings result in an offer, that then takes 2h of work to prepare, your cost of an offer is 875. If 1 out of 3 offers gets accepted, a total cost of sales is 2.652 dollars!

Having lost prospects in each step also means that you need to get 505 visitors to your landing page to acquire a single customer.

You may find it difficult to believe you are spending this much money for each deal. Now, your growth engine may look differently – or you may be more efficient. For example, if you sell directly off your website, you spend less in travels and meeting people.

Or you may not take your time into account. But in fact, your time costs double: what you pay yourself AND the opportunity cost (time you could otherwise spend further developing your business). In addition, eventually, you want to be able to outsource some steps to your employees or third parties. Even with a cost of $35 per hour, your cost of sales is still 2K.

But how does this compare to offline lead generation? Consider these 2 scenarios.

To host a booth on a targeted trade show, you’ll easily spend 10K all inclusive (registration, booth, preparation, time…). You collect 84 business cards, and meet 12 hot leads. You call your 12 leads and schedule 6 meetings. You then add all 84 emails to your nurturing list, which in turn yield 6 extra meetings. From those meetings, taking the same success rate as before, you close 2 deals. This way, a deal costs more than 5K!

Scenario 2: you organize a workshop with 50 participants, spending $500 on venue and catering and 16 hours to prepare, promote and organize the event. You then email and call each participant, spending $625 on phone calls. Assuming the same success rate as before, a deal will cost you just under 2K.

What does this all mean? In B2B, you cannot disregard offline channels. Instead, build a portfolio of channels, and add offline prospects you cannot handle to your automated online nurturing process.

They may just thank you for it.

It also means that if you are serious about growth, you need to know your conversion rates and your cost of sales.

You also want to understand the following two numbers:

The life time value of your customer – what you earn from a customer, over the complete business relationship

Time to ROI – or time that it takes to recuperate the cost of sales. This metric is really important for your cash flow. It impacts the speed at which you can grow, and the requirement for a capital investment.

***

Moving your prospects through the funnel can be a slow and costly process. But there is also a flipside. Small improvements can quickly add up, and make great impact on your bottom line. But more on this tomorrow.

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When you come in contact with a potential prospect for the first time – what do you do?

Do you pitch them your product or a service right away?

We all know that doesn’t work, and here is why:

You simply may not have the right person in front of you

They may not be in the right mindset yet, not ready to buy

They do not know you not trust you yet. Pushing for business to early raises defenses and arouses mistrust.

People hate being sold to.

In other words, you will need to build a trusting relationship with your prospect before you get their permission to pitch. In fact, if you build the relationship right, your prospect may just come out and ask you:

“can you help me with this?”

Building relationships takes time. You will hardly have time for everyone you meet. Especially if you have done the first steps right and you start attracting even more prospects.

What follows are four elements of a system that will help you do just that in no more than 2 minutes per prospect.

Element 1: Nurturing Content

To build a trusting relationship with your prospect, you need to:

Show understanding of their world and their problems

Be genuinely helpful

Demonstrate your expertise (instead of just claiming you’re an expert)

Communicate with them as human beings, no sales talk

Show social proof – people tend to trust other’s opinions of you more than when you toot your own horn

This requires a series of meaningful conversations on topics your prospects care about.

Remember, your prospects want free content – articles, images, videos or presentations – that will help them achieve their goals or solve their problems. Well crafted high quality content can allow you to demonstrate understanding of your prospects’ world, their problems and goals, as well as your expertise in that domain.

When delivered in a respectful, but conversational tone, it will allow you to communicate with your prospects about the stuff that matters to them.

This series of meaningful conversations is how you build a trusting relationship.

For example, I have created a free e-course called “10 Steps to a Scalable Business”, which is a series of business development “lessons” (articles) for entrepreneurs. It runs over a course of a couple of weeks, and people subscribed to this course regularly reach out to me seeking help, which often ends up in new business.

Another example is a series of articles created by Jessie, teaching condo owners about legalities of managing co-ownership of an apartment building. In this very specific niche, he has built a community of more than 2000 followers, all bound by the same content. This allows Jessie to run his business completely online.

Element 2: Consistent, scalable and direct delivery mechanism

There are as many ways in which you can do that as there are ways to communicate. But they are not all created equal.

Of course, face to face communication, like meetings with your prospect, will be by far the most effective. But your prospects may not be ready for it just yet. Even if you phone them, you simply may not have the manpower to reach out to everyone individually in consistent and meaningful way.

Enter e-mail. You might have heard that e-mail is dead and that you should use social networks instead. Although social networks are increasingly important, email is:

Many of the complaints are cause by email that is not done well. Ending up in people’s spam folders is not only ineffective, but can get you blacklisted by the major email providers.

That is why the email combines well with great content that your prospects want to read. That’s also why you need your prospect’s permission – remember the ethical free bribe from day 2.

Therefore, a highly effective and scalable system to nurture your prospects is a series of well crafted, content-rich emails that are sent automatically over a period of time to prospects you met in person, or those who explicitly requested the information via your landing page.

Element 3: The meeting place of online and offline lead generation

Once you have your nurturing system in place, there is no reason why you shouldn’t add your offline prospects to it. Remember that stack of business cards you collected on a networking event? Well, let your assistant type the emails over in an Excel sheet. Then, and send them a small personal note before you add them to the email list.

Element 4: a Strategic sequence

Sharing content for free may seem like an altruistic mission, but it should be clear that you are running a business.

Best is to be open about it. Everyone should be allowed to consume your free content and get value from it. But if they like what they see and want more help, let them know they can get that too.

In other words, your email series needs to have strategic sales argumentation elements – just like your landing page. In fact, it is a lot like a content rich, “sideways” landing page. Imagine a long landing page with lots of content. And then imagine you break it down in pieces and send it over in a couple of emails.

Sideways Landing Page

***

To recap these 3 days, your Growth Engine so far consists of:

a process to attract new prospects

a landing page and a capture strategy (e.g. a freebie)

a lead nurturing process

When you put these elements together, you get a growth engine. Tomorrow, we’ll look at some key numbers that determine how effective and fine-tuned your engine is.

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Attracting prospects to your website is just the very beginning of their journey.

I want you to think about this: how does it feel to search for something online? You visit several web sites, try different search queries, click many links…

Along the way you many pages that are irrelevant to you. It’s quite frustrating, when you think about it. It can feel like such a waste of time. So, how fast do you decide whether a web page is relevant for you?

I’ll tell you: on average, people spend 8 seconds to make this decision.

So you have an important job to do if you want to capture leads, and not just have them bounce off your website and continue surfing. This job is accomplished by a well-crafted landing page.

Landing page is where people “land” after clicking on an ad, a link, a social network update, or on a search result of a search engine.

Your prospects want to get what was promised. And you want them to stay on reading, and take the next step.

This is a job of a landing page.

Most companies have “informational web sites”, full of info about the company and their products. Such websites usually do a bad job in capturing leads. An informational website is not a landing page. An effective landing page needs to contain at least the five following elements.

Element #1: A magnetic headline

The job of a headline is to grab the attention of your visitors and keep them reading. It often consists of the main headline and the subheading. They need to answer the following questions of your prospect:

What is this page about? What can I get here? Do I care about it? How is this different from other offerings?

Element 2: “The better way” section

Now that you have the visitor’s attention, you need to arouse their desire. Show them you have a better way to deal with their problem.
Here’s how others do this:

Demonstrate the result your prospects desire: UserTesting.com shows video clips of users commenting on websites. Olark demonstrates their chat solution as part of their landing page

Show how easy it is to get to the result: use the 1-2-3 steps format, or create an explainer video

Give them a glimpse of your secret sauce: data.com can enrich information about your prospects, but how? Thanks to millions of crowd-sourced contacts and Dun & Bradstreet company profiles.

Element 3: The key benefits section

Here, you want to take your prospect a level deeper, and make sure that

they understand the main benefits of using your service

you answer the question “But do you also do XYZ?”.

Element 4: Trust and credibility elements

Internet is a very mistrusting environment. Lots of reassuring is required to put your prospect at ease. You need to:

Address their objections. Every single prospect is anxious about making a purchase. The most successful companies turn objections into reasons to buy.

Show social proof. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then credible customer testimonials are worth even more. Build up credible testimonials to ground your promotional copy in real-world results and experiences.

Add credibility elements, such as logo of famous brands you served, or newspapers or television programs you appeared in.

Make it look great. How do people judge credibility of websites? According to a large study from Stanford University, the number 1 criterion people use is: the way the website looks. They ask themselves: does this web site look professional?

Element 5: Call to action – or CTA

An effective landing page serves one clear objective: get the visitor to perform a desired action (sign up, leave their contact info, download, request a demo…). The role of a CTA is to compel the visitor to perform that action.

CTA is typically a high contrast button or a form, that visibly stands out on the landing page. The text is formulated as a clear call to perform an action – often composed from a verb and the result the prospect will get: Get Your Free Copy, Sign Up, Start Your Free Trial, Download Now…

But what is a good CTA for a landing page in a B2B context? Try to sell them your service via the website? Well, most B2B buyers will not make a purchase without getting to know you and trust you first.

Up to 79% of leads in B2B are lost because of lack of a process to build a trusting relationship (the so called “lead nurturing”).

But how can you start building a relationship if you don’t even know who you have in front of you? And if – beyond your website – you have no way to communicate to your prospect?

The Ethical Free Bribe

The answer is quite simple: you need to capture their contact information, and get their permission to communicate to them. Getting their permission is not only a legal requirement, but also a great practice.

Unfortunately, most website visitors prefer to remain anonymous. So how do you then get their contact information and the permission to email them? Here is how: by giving them something valuable in return. By helping them solve a problem or achieve a goal. For example, through an e-book, special report, a webinar or an e-course.

You don’t have to spend months creating this so called a “freebie” or an “ethical free bribe”, but it should be well made. Remember: the goal is to start building a trusting relationship with your audience, and the best way to do that is by demonstrating your expertise and commitment to quality in everything you do, including this valuable piece of content.

If you do this right, people will not only give you their contact information, but they will look forward to your next email, expecting genuinely helpful, great content from you. They will even thank you for it. Here are some reactions that we were getting .

***

Now you have turned anonymous website visitors into interested prospect. But this is just a start of a relationship. In day 3, we will see how you can built a meaningful relationship with your prospects at less than 2 minutes per prospect.

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How do you attract new prospects today? Many companies we work with do one or more of the following.

They do cold calling, go to networking events and visit trade shows. The challenge with these face-to-face interactions is that they are difficult to scale. In addition, after a successful event, you are left with a stack of business cards. You focus your limited time on hot contacts, people who showed real interest. The others will soon forget all about you.

Most companies also spread information about themselves and their services via their website, newsletters and social networks. This approach certainly helps creating the awareness about the company and its products and services, but suffers two major problems:

Problem #1: This communication only targets a small number of prospects. Prospects that are ready to buy, aware of the type of service you offer and the terminology you use to describe it. According to the aforementioned study of Chet Holmes, only 3% of all potential prospects are actively buying.

Problem #2: This is a one-size-fits-all approach. There are different types of prospects, and they are all in different phases of a buying process. Spreading the same message to everyone is not an effective strategy.

Let me illustrate this with an example. GoToMeeting by Citrix allows companies to host online meetings and webinars. Their customers include small business, freelancers and companies with offices in multiple locations, or with employees who work remotely. A small number of their prospects may effectively be searching for “tools for online meetings” or “web conferencing tools”. Below are the search estimates provided by Google Keyword Planner tool (the number of monthly searches of these terms).

But what about managers thinking about cutting down travel expenses? Or those that allow their employees to work from home? Or sales reps looking for the best way to prepare a remote sales meeting? Or simply team managers pondering how to make their geographically distributed team members collaborate more effectively?

They are all potential customers of GoToMeeting. The trouble is, they may not be thinking of GoToMeeting.

And guess what? GoToMeeting has thought of these prospects too. They have something for everyone:

A story about a company that not only has their employees working from home, but have successfully abandoned the office completely

Articles on better collaboration

Preparation of sales meetings

And even an attractive infographic on how to be more productive during winter months!

Why is Citrix doing this? Because most prospects are not searching for information about your company and your products. They are searching for content that will help them deal with their problems or achieve their goals.

Here is what this means for you.

Instead of just communicating about your business and your products, you need to spend as much time – if not more – creating, curating and sharing content useful to to your prospects. The best topics are found in the intersection between (1) your expertise, (2) the worldview of your prospects (their job, problems and goals) and (3) what people are actually searching for online.

By spreading these topics via your website, social networks and email, you will attract a much larger number of prospects. And if you do that in a non-salesy way, you will increase the chance of prospects actually liking and even sharing your content.

Even better, you will start branding yourself as an expert in your prospect’s mind.

Does this only impact your online communication?

Not at all. By turning your best content into presentations, you will become interesting to wider audiences on events and conferences. Besides, remember that stack of business cards you collected at an event? Even if they are not ready to buy, most of them will likely benefit from content you create, allowing you to stay top of their mind until they are ready to buy. In day 3, we will show you how to do this without spending much time.

This is a long term strategy that will allow you to build a community of prospects that give you permission to market to them.

But what if you want quick results?

You can start attracting new prospects as early as today using paid ads. Here is how you can supercharge your start using Google AdWords.

Lots of people don’t even consider this step, or just throw some money on visits to their unoptimized website and conclude it was a waste.

However, done right, this step can save you loads of time and provide invaluable information. Google AdWords can be the quickest and most effective way to:

Attract relevant prospects within hours

Start learning which of their problems – or your USPs – different prospects care most about. By crafting different ads with different messages, and letting Google rotate them, you will quickly see where which prospects click the most

The way we like to do this is carry out a series of rapid iterations – just 1 or 2 days each, spending no more than a couple of hundred bucks, and improving every time until the leads start flowing in.

This way you get a tremendous learning value, and the super-fast iteration opportunity. And if the cost is right, Google AdWords may just prove to be a very effective way to quickly grow your business.

Remember, you are not your customer. You cannot know what will work before you try it. I recently earned 17500 euros more on sales of my apartment thanks to Google AdWords. Everyone thought I was crazy to spend 500 euros on attracting buyers to a website with a single apartment on it.

Warning: you may not have great results if you bring your prospects to an informational site. Many companies are competing for a share of your prospects mind. Your prospects are busy and have learned to ignore commercial messages. They don’t really care about your company and products. They want solutions to their problems, stuff that will make them feel or work better.

***

Have a look at your website and be brutally honest with yourself. Is your website about your company and products, or is it made to help your prospects? Now, in Google search, type in “site:<domain name of your website>” (e.g. site:example.com). Study the titles and descriptions. Will they easily attract attention of different types of prospects in different phases? Don’t worry, we’ll show you how to fix those headlines already tomorrow.

That’s all for today. Getting visitors to your website is just a first step. Tomorrow we’ll look at how you can turn anonymous visitors into interested prospects.

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